Afiya Francisco is a Style Expert, television and fashion personality, speaker, and brand ambassador. The Style House is a multimedia platform designed to help women approach their personal style with confidence, simplicity & joy.

An arts and culture journalist, with an interest in fashion, Nathalie's perspective on both subjects is among the most respected in the industry. Known for her thought-provoking coverage with a flair for, perhaps, unconventional references (she cites A&E, Masterpiece Theatre dramas and Elwy Yostshe [Saturday Night at the Movies] as her unofficial sartorial education), Nathalie shares the details of her personal style with The Style House.

Favourite Celeb Style Moment #3

"Leslie Mann's Naeem Khan dress at the recent Emmys was my idea of perfect dressing-up fashion:
it was interesting, individual and she looked like she felt confident and at
ease and like herself. Which is the best a gal can hope for! (That, and
pockets.) It’s my favourite look on the red carpet in years." (2012)

"and also have a soft spot
for Liza Minnelli in yolk-yellow Halston accepting her Oscar in 1973."

Favourite Celeb Style Moment #2

"Marilyn Monroe splashing around the Santa Monica waves
wrapped in a Mexican souvenir tourist cardigan for photographer George Barris."

Favourite Celeb Style Moment #1

"Fred Astaire & Rita Hayworth on the set of You
Were Never Lovelier (1942), one of the lesser-known Astaire dance
films, to the tunes of the Xavier Cugat orchestra. I love her off-camera style
but it’s their shoes that are terrific! Also inspired my love affair with ankle socks."

Nathalie with Comrags

"I
usually call the Comrags studio to make sure we won’t be wearing the
same thing. It’s happened a few times and any more, I risk looking like the
fifth Beatle."

"I’m fundamentally pretty
frugal - I don’t do the designer handbag thing so chances are I would make a
beeline to The Room or log onto SSense.com and buy a pair of Maison Martin Margiela flat lace-ups then
spend anything that’s left on Etsy, expanding my collection of
vintage dress clips."

Windfall Purchase #2

Mail bracelet by Iosselliani

Available
at Gaspard in Toronto.

Windfall Purchase #3

"I’m smitten with the Etsy
vendor GoodbyeFolk, who do custom oxfords and ankle boots in fun colours and
skins, all handmade in Mexico. I’d splurge on two-tone derbys with a Cuban
heel, I think"

Cinelli & Maillet Blowfish ring

"I’ve worn [this]
every day for ten years ."

On-Screen Star Style

"Susan Saint-James’ early
1970s wardrobe in the first season of McMillan
& Wife is tied with all of Audrey Horne’s clothes in Twin Peaks."

Do you prefer to dress for an occasion or for
everyday?

If I didn’t have my casual daily uniform and had to dress like people imagine a fashion magazine editor does, I would be flummoxed every morning; dressing what I consider ‘up’ for fashion stuff is rarer and therefore easier and more fun.

Would you rather be overdressed or underdressed?

Underdressed. Because I usually am.

Do you have a signature style or prefer to keep 'em guessing?

Pattern, colour and eyeglasses, lately almond cat’s eyes and usually from Rapp; Mel and Julia named a cat’s eye frame for me last year. Toppers and tunics and trousers. I like my slouchy Smythe jackets – this fall it’s the Sack blazer in tweedy flannel, and I don’t like full-length pants – all my trousers and jeans are cropped. I own every colour J.Crew’s Minnie pant has come in. In the warmer weather, tabi or slip-on flats with bare ankles, in cooler climes then Roots cabin socks fill the gap between cuff and ankle boot. My staple Yoga jeans once came in a cropped ankle version, and I have since had all subsequent pairs I’ve bought cut that way. I don’t know why but I like the proportion better. In summertime, it’s dresses with ankle socks, derbys and no jewellery except the Cinelli & Maillet blowfish ring I’ve worn every day for ten years. What my mother might call frumpy, I prefer to call artsy.

Name your all-time favourite outfits:

There is a Comme des Garçons zigzag black and white print dress that I think of as suit of armour, of sorts, for days when I need to not be thinking about clothes. I’ve worn it to interview people like Whit Stillman, Joe Zee, Audrey Tautou. I call it my 1920s lawn bowling dress and wear it with thick-soled Junya Watanabe for Comme [des Garcons] frankenshoes (which look a lot like the ones Simon Rocha just showed at LFW) and lacy Japanese ankle socks. It’s not that it’s flattering – it isn’t, it’s a sort of long dropwaist sack with pockets, and sheer so I wear it over a vintage-style Maggie the Cat slip (Comrags makes the perfect Fifties microfiber slips and they are a closet staple for under everything filmy). It’s the only thing I dry-clean and if it’s at the cleaners when an important interview came up on short notice, I might panic.

I can’t fit into vintage dresses so I collect vintage novelty day-dress coats and my absolute favourite thing in my closet is a vintage-looking one by Comrags that I tend to wear for evening designer-meeting things, with rolled-up jeans or cigarette pants. To meet Jason Wu, Prabal Gurung ... It’s a plainly-cut topper in a gorgeous glossy coated metallic gold French eyelet. Inès de la Fressange admired it when I met her (she thought it was Dries or vintage) and I my teen self just about died of girl crush. I love the coat so much I have to resist wearing it every day. It makes me happy.

Heels or Flats?

I have no patience for teetering and mincing steps but even if I could master them physically and had a Town Car lifestyle, psychologically I just cant get anything done in heels. Roots derbys, Fluevog oxfords, Church's classic brogues, metallic penny loafers, Bass saddle shoes are what are in my closet...Flats, almost always flats!
And when they’re not, Chie Mihara shoes or professional dancer footwear by Canadian outfitter
Bella Dance Shoes. I
like heels that could pass for vintage, but aren’t –

Ease
and style are modern. Suffering for style is retrograde. I can
understand personal discipline in the interest of fashion, but not
suffering. It took centuries for women to be liberated from hobble
skirts and panniers and stomachers and whale boning and painful corset
stays and constricting girdles, and Spanx are just girdles by another name. Would I personally suffer for fashion? I won’t really even exercise for fashion...

Is there an occasion that you will break this rule?

Only for those rare times when I do traditional evening gown dress-up, for charity dinners like AmFar where a seat at the table costs more than
a Vera Wang wedding gown. I might break the rule and put on full-body
shapewear, sure, or wear uncomfortable shoes or less-than-comfortable
clothes. And only then do I dust off the really high heels. At Suzanne
Rogers’ fashion fundraiser for Marchesa, for example, I wore a pair of
140mm-high Rupert Sanderson spiky stilettos from The Room that were so
out of character for those who know me, my friends demanded photographic
proof.

Nathalie in Marchesa. Photography, George Pimentel

Always stylish or does even fashion need to take a break? Any exceptions?

There are a
two sides and my dominant one is almost never what any style would ever
call ‘fashionable.’

I joke that it’s my strategy to go incognito but in truth that's an ongoing discussion – that you
don’t have to cook like a Michelin chef to be a restaurant critic and
in fashion I don’t believe there is any ‘looking the part’ – whatever
that means – to the part of the fashion writer. (Or designer.
Look at what Sarah Burton wears for example!) Maybe being a
fashion magazine editor is perceived differently and there are
expectations because of the way pop culture has cultivated
that persona but I’m a newspaper journalist and culture writer, not
Miranda Priestly or Maggie Prescott. That said, when required other 25%
of the time I do know how to properly get dressed and appreciate that
yes, I have some very nice clothes. I enjoy getting dressed for an
occasion, just not every day.

Team Anna (Wintour) or Team Carine (Roitfeld)

Team Alexandra (Schulman), of British Vogue.
She’s the thinking woman’s Vogue editor. (Hers is the even the best of
the Vogue iPad apps.) Not only did Schulman sit on the Orange Prize
literary jury, her own debut novel Can We Still Be
Friends? is very good.